Re: News -[re: Fossil Power Plant Pollution]

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

I am not claiming, nor have I even suggested, that mercury and other air
pollutants are not very hazardous in sufficiently high concentration, or
even that some of those concentrations are pretty small.  However:

1.  I gave Donora as an example.  There have been other air pollution
episodes and I never implied that Donora ws the only one.
2.  I had occasion to review some of the British literature on air pollution
and mortality, and I have considerable question about the connection between
mortality and air pollution.  This is a connection that is extraordinarily
difficult in any case because of confounding factors.
3.  In 1964, I made a mercury manometer to measure a low vacuum.  My
manometer contained literally liters of mercury (I raised and lowered the
reservoir with a pulley system) and in the course of making and using the
manometer I spilled mercury all over the place, including on heated
surfaces, in my small enclosed lab.  We cleaned up the spilled mercury with
a compound known commercially as HgX, and the Baltimore Health Department
came and checked us out.  I'm not claiming the mercury spills were a good
idea -- they were of course accidental -- but my own experience causes me to
question the statement "break a mercury
>containing thermometer and spill even one drop of mercury onto a hot stove
in
>a closed room and the airborne mercury levels in a room will be acutely
fatal
>because mercury crosses the blood-brain barrier. "  The mercury I spilled
was clearly not acutely fatal.
4.  The threshold limit value (TLV) for mercury vapor and cadmium vapor are
the same : 0.05 mg/cu. m. (from Hawley's Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 12th
ed.)  lead is 0.15 mg/cu. m; uranium, 0.2 mg/ cu. m.
5.  One of the major soures of mercury in U. S. waterways, and the source of
Minamata disease, is the mercury used in chlorine manufacture that is simply
dumped, or was until the EPA established standards for both waterborne and
airborne mercury.  I believe this is a considerably larger source than coal
burning.   Our experience with mercury in water is that it is metabolized by
waterborne organisms to methyl mercury -- the causative factor for Minamata
disease -- whose effects are in fact different from those of mercury vapor,
though equally, if not more, nasty.
6.  Yes, you can suffocate by inhaling so much CO2 that it blocks oxygen
intake, but I seriously doubt if airborne CO2 (which is a normal constituent
of clean air) will do it.  I've become short of breath by reaching into a
dry ice freezer, and I might have died had I stuck my head in the freezer
and breathed deeply and stayed there.  Dry ice -- solid CO2 -- has many uses
and almost anyone using it or handling it (no, not with your bare hands)
inhales a higher concentration than the ambient airborne CO2 from power
plants.  Moreover, I don't believe the "war on CO2" came about because CO2
is toxic by inhalation but because of the influence on global warming.  CO2
is also not the only naturally occurring substance listed by EPA as "toxic
by inhalation" because in high enough concentration, it is.  Nitrogen (80%
of air) is another, and you can certainly be asphyxiated by breathing pure
nitrogen.

It's all a matter of concentration.  More important, just as in control of
radiation exposure, the approach to pollution control should be an
intelligent one, and not fueled by hysteria.  Fossil fuel plants have
cleaned up their effluent considerably since 1970, and they still need to do
more -- that is unarguable -- but the cleanup will not be enhanced by
exaggeration.  Moreover, the rationale for air pollution cleanup should not
be ONLY that air pollution will kill you.

Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: RadiumProj@cs.com <RadiumProj@cs.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Sunday, April 23, 2000 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: News -[re: Fossil Power Plant Pollution]


>In a message dated 4/23/00 6:00:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>ruth_weiner@email.msn.com writes:
>
><<I am a little mystified as to why the other
>constituents of fly ash (e.g., lead, uranium, cadmium, etc.) aren't in
there
>along with mercury.>>
>
>COMMENT:
>These other constituents are vaporized or released as very fine
particulates
>along with mercury. However, mercury because of its much higher vapor
>pressure tends to be released to a greater degree than the other elements
>noted from coal,  as well as not condensing back to particulate form in the
>



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